I'm a privacy pragmatist, writing about the intersection of law, technology, social media and our personal information. If you have story ideas or tips, e-mail me at khill@forbes.com. PGP key here.
These days, I'm a senior online editor at Forbes. I was previously an editor at Above the Law, a legal blog, relying on the legal knowledge gained from two years working for corporate law firm Covington & Burling -- a Cliff's Notes version of law school.
In the past, I've been found slaving away as an intern in midtown Manhattan at The Week Magazine, in Hong Kong at the International Herald Tribune, and in D.C. at the Washington Examiner. I also spent a few years traveling the world managing educational programs for international journalists for the National Press Foundation.
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Beware, Tech Abandoners. People Without Facebook Accounts Are 'Suspicious.'

The term “Crackberry” seems silly today — and not just because consumers OD’ed on Blackberry and moved on to iDealers. The term arose in an earlier “aughts” time when Blackberry dominated the smartphone market and lawyers and execs were nearly the only ones who had them, due to their need to be able to respond to email immediately. Things have changed. Now we all need to be able to respond to email immediately. And to tweet. And to instantly share our photos on Facebook. We’re all addicted to technology now, and not just to the Blackberry. We’re “addicted” to our iPhones, and Facebook, and Twitter, and Android, and Pinterest, and iPads, and Word with Friends, and fill-in-the-blank-with-your-digital-dope-of-choice.

The sudden and dramatic advent of social-media-enabling technologies into our lives seems to be causing some mid-digital-life crises. Not only has Silicon Valley developed a guilty conscience about addicting us to screens, we the users are starting to question how technology is changing us: making us fat, making us unhealthy, making us depressed, making us lonely, making us narcissistic, and making us waste time worrying about whether it’s making us fat, unhealthy, depressed, narcissistic and/or lonely. That’s leading some users to consider abandoning the whole enterprise. My colleague Haydn Shaughnessy gave up his smartphone last year. Now, inspired by the example of former Facebooker Katherine Losse, he’s considering giving up Facebook.

Slashdot flagged a German news story in which an expert noted that mass murderers Anders Breivik and James Holmes both lacked much of a social media presence, leading to the conclusion, in Slashdot’s phrasing, that “not having a Facebook account could be the first sign that you are a mass murderer.”

That’s a tad extreme, but I’m seeing the suggestion more and more often that a missing Facebook account raises red flags. After a woman found out via Facebook that a man who’d ‘poked’ her in real life had a long term girlfriend, she turned to digital manners advice givers Farhad Manjoo and Emily Yoffe of Slate to ask whether she should tell the girlfriend. They said she should and then went on a digression about transparent romances in the age of Facebook:

Farhad: I think we’ve mentioned it before that if you are going out with someone and they don’t have a Facebook profile, you should be suspicious.

Emily: Wait a minute. You may have mentioned that.

Farhad: I think I’ve recommended that. You know why, though? Imagine if this guy didn’t have a Facebook profile. That’s why. You should be suspicious of someone who is not making your relationship known publicly on a site like Facebook. I’m going to go on record with that.

Emily: I’m fine with people not having a Facebook page if they don’t want one. However, I think you’re right. If you’re of a certain age and you meet someone who you are about to go to bed with, and that person doesn’t have a Facebook page, you may be getting a false name. It could be some kind of red flag.

It’s not just love seekers who worry about what the lack of a Facebook account means. Anecdotally, I’ve heard both job seekers and employers wonder aloud about what it means if a job candidate doesn’t have a Facebook account. Does it mean they deactivated it because it was full of red flags? Are they hiding something?

The idea that a Facebook resister is a potential mass murderer, flaky employee, and/or person who struggles with fidelity is obviously flawed. There are people who choose not to be Facebookers for myriad non-psychopathic reasons: because they find it too addictive, or because they hold their privacy dear, or because they don’t actually want to know what their old high school buddies are up to. My own boyfriend isn’t on Facebook and I don’t hold it against him (too much).

But it does seem that increasingly, it’s expected that everyone is on Facebook in some capacity, and that a negative assumption is starting to arise about those who reject the Big Blue Giant’s siren call. Continuing to navigate life without having this digital form of identification may be like trying to get into a bar without a driver’s license.

Case in point: Katherine Losse, the ex-Facebook employee that quit the company and the social network after cashing in her stock options, and who inspired my colleague to consider UnFacebooking, couldn’t stay off Facebookfor long. She wound up opening a new account.

“You can’t get away from it. It’s everything. It’s everywhere,” she told the Washington Post. “The moment we’re in now is about trying to deal with all this technology rather than rejecting it, because obviously we can’t reject it entirely.”

Well, you can, but it might lead to your being rejected down the line too.

* Updated August 7 to include some reasons why a person might choose not to be on Facebook, beyond being too busy planning commando attacks.

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This is hilarious. I’m in your age bracket and I remember being very young and very fond of computers and especially the internet before it gained critical mass. It was an absolute nightmare trying to convince anyone that this stuff wasn’t “just for nerds”. Things like IRC where you could have actual, immediate conversations were looked at as weird and creepy. People don’t even remember the older social sites like xanga, bolt or friendster. What was popular? Ad plastered AIM and MSN. Same damn thing as ICQ, which they would’ve never touched.

Now the same people that were confused and wary of technology are calling other people creepy for not using the same technologies they once labeled nerdy. I guess this is because of the general culture shift to elevating prepackaged nerdiness as defined by TV shows. Now you can be a nerd too by just pressing big icons on a smartphone. Ain’t life grand?

Some people have moved on, some people want privacy, and some people just don’t give a damn about you waiting in line for a burger.

I’m speaking for “your age group”. You’re a moron, get some real friends. See me and my large group of friends keep tabs of each other actively because we are actual friends. If you seriously need a website where people post neutral things to thousands of people to keep track of your “friends” that’s sad. What a chore actually communicating personally with my friends, what trite bullshit. GET OFF FACEBOOK AND GET SOME REAL FRIENDS.

The writer of this article is ridiculousness and a narcissistic. Who really values the “like” and disconnection of friendships? How about showing the amount of lives facebook has actually ruined? Family’s that have broken apart because someone hooked up with a old classmate, pictures that incriminate Facebook is a trailer park and if you have a account i suspect you are a clingy needy individual.

Sounds to me like you are not the type of person who has real friends — the type who don’t think it is to much trouble to take the time to call someone or better yet, visit them. You put quantity over quality — and your entire style of writing tells this to all.

I absolutely agree Milx. Facebook has allowed me to be more socially active because of my ability to connect with people I would rarely see or who no longer live near me. It’s not as if I couldn’t call people up individually, but Facebook makes it much easier. It’s not a substitute for physical interaction, it’s a useful TOOL to facilitate it. I don’t understand all the hostility toward Facebook. I don’t pick on people for not using it, so why should they pick on me for using it?

@schmoe you hit the nail right on the head there. Back in ’95 when I was studying Computer Science at college it was seen as weird to use chat programs (ICQ), build your own websites (GeoCities) and spend your evenings researching random subjects online by non-techie inclined people.

Um, I don’t see what’s wrong with Facebook being an essential part of life anymore than phones or the Internet or even PENCILS AND FIRE. All are forms of technology that serve a pragmagic function in modern life.